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I am working on a landscape visualization and this is the latest state.

http://www.wallis-eck.de/bigger/Landschaft_ohneGitter.jpg

I am now waiting for Cornucopia to download some of the Pine trees which I need for the forrest. I also want to add some "life", like animals and boats on the lake..

best,
Walli

Jorge Arango

08-10-2005, 12:58 PM

Hi,

I am working on a landscape visualization and this is the latest state.

I am now waiting for Cornucopia to download some of the Pine trees which I need for the forrest. I also want to add some "life", like animals and boats on the lake..

best,
Walli

Good work Walli. What do you think of Vue after being a heavy user of Xfrog? Have you tried exporting/importing Vue/Cinema? Compositing?

Jorge Arango

Walli

08-10-2005, 01:07 PM

I only made some simple tests combining Vue with Cinema - just to see if it works, and it did (but I heard that there are some synchro pronblems in the meantime...)

Xfrog plants inside Vue work fine, also inside Ecosystems. There are of course some limitations compared to SolidGrowth plants:
- backlighting doesnīt work (e.on, please fix that! Why we canīt use backlighting on imported plants :-( )
- automatic variations and wind doesnīt work
Apart from that, Xfrog plants look better in most cases. I just have to find out, what factor is bottleneck: geometry/polycount or use of alphamaps or size of textures. Because I easily create hundreds of thousands of solid growth trees, with Xfrog trees Itīs harder to reach such high plant numbers.

DigReal

08-10-2005, 09:14 PM

Very convincing landscape, Walli. Excellent work!

How'd you handle the terrain? Is it a single procedural terrain, or did you piece it together? I also like the lake, very natural looking.

Walli, I was sorry you couldn't make it to Siggraph this year (I know you had good reason). But I'm glad to see you posting some work in this forum. Did you look at the 'desert Vue' thread below? After 3 years, I'm finally going to give your usa southwest stuff a good workout. Could never do what I wanted to in Vue4... had to wait for ecosystems. Anyway, you're more than welcome to stop by that thread and offer any pointers you might want. :thumbsup: Have you worked with the cacti in V5i yet?

Like I said, excellent work... post some more. :)

doonee

08-10-2005, 11:56 PM

hey walli !
wabe did some tests on using combo-trees and 3ds objects in the ecosystem,
over on page 3 of thread called... 'Stupid question, I'm sure, but.....' ,
perhaps that could interest you ..
:)

rgds
d

Walli

08-11-2005, 07:43 AM

Hi Stefan,

as combo trees are treated the same way as regular objects, it makes more sense for me to use a working plant editor like Xfrog.
But if e-on would be able to make combo trees "really" work, then this would be anice option.
How is it going in Brasil? Internet somehow makes the world small ;-)

@ Steve : I didnīt forget about your plants, I hope to be able to attack them later on in the summer or autumn. But at this time I am reallly reaching my limits ;-)

mdunakin

08-11-2005, 10:31 AM

Walli, I so far love your image there.

I have some comments and critques and a few questions or so.

For me, the houses seem just slightly too large in scale compared to like
the trees in the foreground, and sort of throw the scale off a bit.
But the rest of the scene looks pretty awesome, though I think the shadows are
a tad bit too dark from, say, the tress that you see there in the foreground?

Now, Is that one giant landscape and if so, how did you create that?
Cuz it looks awesome and like it really goes off to far, far away or something?

Second, how did you (and others) get the roads on your terrain and actually
placed where you want them?

And how did you manage to get you trees to only be in some of those areas
and still leave some open ground areas on your terrains like that and also
still manage to keep them from going into the water at the same time?

And last, are those birds actually flapping their wings while flying?!
Cuz the motion blur gives that impression, since the rest of the
bird's bodies aren't blured as much?

Thanx and post up more when you get some..................md :)

.

Walli

08-11-2005, 11:41 AM

caution, a lot of text is following ;-)

the scaling of the houses is to big, you are right. But they are just place holders and will be replaced later on
I had a look at reference images via google, for example this one: http://www.deerhurstresort.com/files/Aerial%20View%20Deerhurst%20Resort.jpg
as you can see, the shadows also look very dark and this I tried to "mimic"
the landscape in the foreground is a real world landscape. I got heightmap and some more maps that I used to create distribution bitmaps for the ecosystem.From behind the "city" itīs three more simple vue terrains with simpler ecosystems on it
as mentioned, I created a "complex" material with several layers, the last ones are set to Ecosystem. The distribution of materials is done with bitmaps
I modeled and animated a simple bird in Cinema4D. Then I used a particle system to create a swarm, rendered with motionblur and composited on top of Vue render
the road - itīs only one in there, everything else would look like a road by incident ;-) - I simply painted the road into the Vue picture. In case that the customer likes what he seeīs, I will try to realize the road inside Vue, because it might be that this scene has to be animated
I hope I could answer some of the questions

royboy

08-11-2005, 12:39 PM

Wow - Very realistic I must say. Good job. On the ground material - did you use procedural or texture bitmaps? Or a mix of both?
rgds royboy

mdunakin

08-11-2005, 01:49 PM

Thanx for that info Walli.

And as for the shadows, I see in the real picture, it all depends on
what the shadows are being cast onto, I guess.
Because on the grass, the shadows ARE dark, but going over the road,
the shadows are much lighter.
And shadows on and from the buildings are also lighter.
But, from your scene, I guess you do have the shadows pretty right on, at least with
the trees and grass, as there is nothing else to compare them with in that scene.

So, let me make sure I got you right about the maps?
You had to create giant bit maps to match up with the terrains?
How did you go about doing that and doing it so that they were right where you
want them, since when I look down from the top view in Vue, I can't tell didly squat
about what's what or what altitudes ANYTHING is or anything else that relevant?

And what size maps did you use?

I want to learn about creating maps to apply to my own scenes, especially, since
my desert scenes will have to have dirt roads in them as well as some paved roads.

Could you post some samples of what your bit maps look like, just to get an idea from them?

And the birds really work out well.
Compositing always rules! :)

About the only other thing I would notice about the image, is that it has what most
CG work has, and that is too much great colors, when you compare it to real life
pictures like that sample you showed us, real life are always more bland
and boring and almost faded when compared to CG work.
But I see this sort of thing with practically every CG render I see.
Too clean of colors and not boring, blended and faded enough.

But hey, it's artwork and also just my opinions anyway :)

Anyway, still way awesome and keep up the great work and post more when you get them.
And of course, thanx for your great peply!

............md :)

.

Walli

08-11-2005, 02:45 PM

actually itīs pretty easy, only a lot of work ;-)

As I said, I got a heightmap for the foreground terrain. Together with the heightmap, I got a false-color map of the same terrain, every color represents a specific natural cover.
I used this false color map to create black white bitmaps (water-land, grass-forrest and so on)
I simplified the real distribution a lot, otherwise I would have had to use dozens of distribution maps. Actually I started this way, but Vue got very sluggish, so I restarted with a simplified distribution.
The bitmaps have a resolution of about 2000*1000, but I think smaller size would be enough.
Sorry that I am not allowed to post the bitmaps, but they are copyrighted.

DigReal

08-11-2005, 06:55 PM

Mark, some of what Walli is doing with maps is the same basic technique I used for the desert path/litterbug render posted in the desert thread. Of course, what Walli is doing is far more sophisticated than anything I dare try. :eek: Since its been a while, I need to practice the technique again for some desert ecosystem scenes. I'll do some screen caps as I go along in the hopes that it'll help anyone interested. If I remember right, the distribution maps for the ground materials and ecosystems can be very small, but still effective.

The only trick to it all is, practice and patience.

mdunakin

08-11-2005, 08:17 PM

Thanx the both of you for your info on this subject and thanx Dig for the screen shots,
when ever you get them posted up.

I want to try that sort of thing out.

Of course, the first thing I need to do is to figure out how to get some decent desert
plants imported into Vue, as I keep running into stupid problems, as some of my
plugins that I used to use years ago, don't work right with LW8x.

....................md :)

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